Introducing a new way to remotely backup your site
We are pleased to announce the general availability of Akeeba Remote Control Command Line Interface, dubbed Remote CLI for short. Remote CLI is a command-line application which allows you to remotely update Akeeba Backup, as well as take/download/delete/list backups on remote sites. As a command line utility it can easily be used to scheduled the backup of a large number of sites by means of CRON jobs / scheduled tasks and script / batch files on all platforms where PHP can run, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
This tool comes to fill the void left when, back in May, we discontinued Akeeba Remote Control, our graphical tool to remotely take and manage backups. As we had promised back then on the forum, we were working on a replacement solution. While it was apparent that coming up with a cross-platform solution was nigh impossible, there was also the incessant question of being able to develop a "scheduling capable" solution. More specifically, power users requested a way to have Remote Control to run backups of their sites without the application being launched in the foreground. With those in mind, we came up with a solution that would satisfy both the multi-platform and the scheduling capable constraints: Remote CLI.
Remote CLI is written entirely in PHP and delivered as a convenient PHAR file. PHAR files (short for PHP Archive) is the modern way to deliver an entire PHP application as a single file, capable of being run by PHP 5.2 with the PEAR PHAR extension or, even better, natively under PHP 5.3. Given that all pre-packaged local server solutions (e.g. XAMPP, MAMP, WAMPserver, Uniform Server, Zend Server CE, etc) come with PHP 5.3, it's very likely that the requirements are already met by your system. If you are on Linux or Mac OS X, the PHP binary is most likely already installed or can be trivially installed on your system. Even on Windows, the PHP project provides an easy to use installer. It's, therefore, extremely easy to meet the one and only pre-requisite of using Remote CLI: having a command line version of PHP!
As with most of our software, Remote CLI is available for download completely free of charge. We urge you to read the documentation before even attempting to use it – it is unlikely that you will be able to use it without reading the documentation anyway. The software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. Its source code is publicly available in our Subversion repository and you are welcome to use it under the terms of the GNU GPL v3.
If you would like to receive support for Remote CLI you are welcome to post in the Akeeba Backup forum, or file a support ticket if you have access to the Private Tickets section of our site. As per our usual policy, since July 2011 we no longer offer free support. In order to request support you have to be a subscriber. Subscriptions start at 7.79 EUR for an 8-day full pass to our support forum. As an exception to this rule, if you are a developer who wishes to use our code in his project(s), you are welcome to contact us directly.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer, AkeebaBackup.com